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Flash back to December 2010. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) called a press conference. Rumors circulated that the agency was about to announce that life had been discovered somewhere other than planet Earth. The real news wasn’t that big, but it was close. A 33-year-old biologist, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, had discovered a bacteria that seemed to break a cardinal rule of biology. All life forms on earth use six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. But in Mono Lake in California, Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues had found a type of bacteria, GFAJ-1, that seemed to have replaced phosphorus with arsenic.

If some of the basic building blocks of life could be replaced with other elements, that would dramatically expand the types of environments on other planets that might support life. It was Arthur C. Clarke-level stuff, and set off a wave of hype. Even months later, Timenamed Wolfe-Simon to its annual Time 100 list of the most important people in the country.

But as soon as Wolfe-Simon’s paper hit, many other scientists started to express concerns, and they quickly started to sound like more than just the sniper fire of jealous critics. Just five days after the news broke, Carl Zimmer, one of the finest science writers working today, was out with a piece in Slate, pulling all the critiques together. The title, a quote from a source, said it all: “This Paper Should Not Have Been Published.”

Today, Science Magazine, one of the top scientific journals and the original publisher of the GFAJ-1 work,is publishing two new papers that completely demolish the argument that GFAJ-1 is a completely new form of life. Early on, the magazine’s editors make the point quietly: “Contrary to an original report, the new research clearly shows that the bacterium, GFAJ-1, cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive.” Later,they repeat it for emphasis, in stronger terms: “In conclusion,” they write, “the new research shows that GFAJ-1 does not break the long-held rules of life, contrary to how Wolfe-Simon had interpreted her group’s data.”

In other words, the critics were right. Science notes, somewhat defensively, that “the scientific process is a naturally self-correcting one” and that GFAJ-1, now downgraded to a bacteria that can “only” survive in arsenic-laced environments that would kill other living things, is still “of interest for further study.” (GFAJ-1, in other words, is still pretty cool.)

What do these two papers do? The first, by Tobias Erb at ETH Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland, looked at whether arsenic really had taken over the the biological processes usually served by phosphorus, as Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues had argued. One of these key functions is to be part of the backbone of DNA. But mass spectrometry showed that GFAJ-1′s DNA was still phosphorus, and confirmed “the absence of arsenic.”

A second paper, by Marshall Reaves and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, found that when a lack of phosphorus is keeping GFAJ-1 from growing, adding arsenic doesn’t cause it to grow faster. The DNA doesn’t react chemically in the way one would expect if there were arsenic-based bonds in it. And, again, mass spectrometry didn’t seem to show any detectable arsenic bondedwithin the DNA and only trace amounts of arsenic.

The senior author on the Vancouver paper is Rosemary J. Redfield, who was a central character in Zimmer’s original takedown: She took to her blog immediately to explain why the paper was unlikely to be true. Now she’s led the way to proving that, again, GFAJ-1 “does not break the long-held rules of life.”

Redfield was presenting her results at a scientific meeting, the Joint Congress of Evolutionary Biology, tonight, and Carl Zimmer was live-blogging her talk. Here is Redfield, via Zimmer, explaining how a big press conference was called for a paper that probably shouldn’t have been published at all.

Redfield: This is a story of serial failure. Lead author convinced of evidence without good research, senior authors didn’t provide supervision. Co-authors should have accepted responsibility. Reviewers failed, missed a lot of problems. Science failed in selecting reviewers.

8:42 “And finally, NASA failed big time.”

But Rosie Redfield, posting her lab’s results on the Internet and blogging in real time, managed to puncture the hype in real time. And now, thanks to the more traditional, lumbering process of peer-review, a year and a half later, we have the final coda, real proof that there was no “arsenic life” after all, just more proof that the known kind of life, based on oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur, is surprisingly versatile able to thrive in a lake full of arsenic — or in a blogosphere.

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I read the early material and none said the bacteria could substitute arsenic for DNA phosphorus. They merely stated that this bacterium could tolerate more environmental arsenic than any other known. How this got so over blown is beyond me.

The abstract of the paper clears states “Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins.” Without the claim that arsenate was able to substitute for phosphate in biological molecules the paper would not have been published in Science. Finding a bacteria with a high tolerance for arsenic is not surprising, and definitely not worthy of a NASA announcement. There are many known Bacteria and Archaea that are able to tolerate the arsenate levels at which their experiments were performed (40 mM). That is also not worthy of a publication in Science.

From Wolfe-Simon’s abstract: “Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bio-elements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical importance.”

That says the bacteria can substitute arsenic for phosphorus. It got overblown because they said this, and did a special press conference that seemed to indicate it must be a HUGE deal.